Page 118 of The Blood we Crave

I shouldn’t be hurt by him still not replying. But I can’t blame him. Expressing emotions and vulnerability has never really been his forte. It’s not his fault that I fell in love with someone so cold.

Or maybe it is.

“Why are you here?” I ask, turning the tables.

He’s the one inhabiting my old home, standing in this room like it’s a completely normal part of his day to day. As if this isn’t the space where our mother and father once stood together in a final parting.

This question makes him move. He slowly pulls away from the window, turning his body so that he is facing me. His back still rests against the wall, hands tucked into his pockets.

He looks like Thatcher, with all his normal features, but I can see the hint of purple beneath his eyes. Dark circles from stress or lack of sleep, maybe both.

“I thought it was the one place you wouldn’t come.”

I can’t help the way my eyebrows tug together, the way I scoff out a laugh and shake my head. I take several steps forward, standing in the center of the room.

“You don’t get it, do you?” I say with something like frustration sitting on my tongue. “There is no place where you are that I wouldn’t go to.”

After all these years, he still can’t see past his own blinders to see that I would do anything, go anywhere, for him. There is no other option for me. The string that attaches us refuses to let me go. My heart would revolt if I left him.

He is not my love.

He is my obsession. As in a person who continually preoccupies and intrudes on my mind. A sickness, a drug that I refuse to quit or seek help for. I don’t want to live a life he isn’t in.

That is a fate crueler than any death.

To exist in a world he no longer breathes in.

“And you know what that makes you?” he says, cocking his head to the side with an icy stare. “Not a hopeless romantic or even pathetic. It makes you dangerous. Reckless. You’ll follow me anywhere. What about to the grave, pet? Because if you keep this up, that’s where you will be.”

A tightness expands in my chest.

“Are you saying you think the Halo will make good on their threats?”

“I’m telling you, the closer you try to get to me is another step towards an early funeral.”

I shake my head. “I don’t care. I won’t—”

“You are naïve, Lyra Abbott,” he interrupts, pushing off the wall so that he is standing tall. “A naïve, sick girl that formed this idea in your head when you were a child that I was an angel.”

My mouth opens to interject, but he pushes forward. Each word is cruel, his tongue slashing into my sensitive flesh, cutting me open and making me bleed all the ways I’ll never be able to love him.

“All you are to me is an inconvenient blip in my childhood. A target that I should have killed, like my father ordered. A mistake that I should’ve never touched.” Thatcher runs his hand across his jaw. “It’s time to wake up. Come back to life. You are not my ghost, and I am done being your obsession.”

All the points on my body that have felt his hands throb in pain. A being called a mistake. Salty, fresh tears hit my upper lip. I can taste their desperation, their pain.

“I accept that you are cold,” I breathe, visible puffs expelled from my lips. “Filled to the brim with ice. Sometimes it physically hurts to stand too close to you.”

I take a step towards him. Another. Then another.

“I accept you feel nothing. That long ago, someone ripped the softness from you with their teeth, and now you are nothing but sharp edges.” My words choke me, a sob forming around the words.

But I keep moving forward on unsteady legs until I am standing right in front of him, his body a mere inch away from my own, my head inclined so that I can look him in the eyes.

“I even accept that you are cruel. So fucking cruel, Thatcher Pierson. There is nothing about you I wouldn’t accept. I will meet your cold with my warmth. I will let your sharp edges do their worst because I was made to bleed for you.”

My knuckles are white, balled at my side. His blue eyes are a shimmering, frozen lake, only reflecting my emotion in their mirror.

But his gaze—always so blank, serious, and intense—it softens slightly. I only recognize it because I know his face so well and because even if he doesn’t notice it, he looks at me differently than he does anyone else.